“I anticipate that the community of attorneys specializing in the representation of shareholders seeking class-action targets would be thrilled to see this proposal adopted,” said Richard Murray, a former head of legal affairs at Deloitte & Touche and now a lawyer whose clients include an association of the world’s biggest insurance company chief executives. His prepared remarks were presented at the first of two days of hearings on the PCAOB’s August proposal to expand the auditor’s report on corporate financial statements.

“The once great feast of class actions against company and auditor has been curtailed by judicial and legislative restraints in recent years,” he noted before a panel discussion about how well the proposal would carry out the intent of the report by the U.S. Treasury’s Advisory Committee on the Auditing Profession (ACAP), of which Murray was a member.

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The Oct. 6, 2008 report, issued in the midst of the financial crisis, called on the PCAOB to take “the auditor’s report beyond the current pass/fail model to include a more relevant discussion about the audit of the financial statements.”

In one of the more prominent changes, the PCAOB proposed that the auditor’s report detail “critical audit matters [CAM] as determined by the auditor.” Such matters would be the ones “the auditor addressed during the audit of the financial statements that involved the most difficult, subjective, or complex auditor judgments or posed the most difficulty to the auditor in obtaining sufficient appropriate audit evidence or forming an opinion on the financial statements.” If the auditor found no critical matter, he or she would have to state that in the report.

Another panelist and former ACAP member, Gaylen Hansen, said that the PCAOB standard should limit the CAM report to “those few things that keep the auditors awake at night” during the time they’re assessing the financials of their corporate clients. Hansen, an immediate past chair of the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) and an audit partner at EKS&H, said that he believed the proposal met the basic objectives of the treasury committee and that he supported it.

Murray, however, contended that another main goal of the committee was to make sure “no harm is done to the pass/fail model of the capital markets.” By adding auditors’ worries and insights to that model, the PCAOB’s proposal would open them up to civil lawsuits. Such suits, he said, could involve the plaintiff’s lawyer asking the auditor that if he or she had such concerns about the company, “Why didn’t you carry through?”

If, on the other hand, the company’s problem doesn’t concern any previously reported CAMs, shareholders can claim “that many concerns were expressed by the auditor but not the right one, leaving the auditor and the company to defend a multitude of judgments that have none of the established decision criteria that exists for the single pass/fail judgment,” Murray argued in his prepared remarks.

Questioned by PCAOB chairman James Doty on what could be done about the litigation risks, Murray offered an idea he said that ACAP previously explored: providing auditors with a similar protection that corporate directors enjoy under the business judgment rule.

Rather than provide “full protection or accommodation” for auditors as they report the critical matters that concern them during the audit, they could be protected on statements of concern that involve audit issues that may be in “a gray zone” between propriety and impropriety, he said.

For his part, Hansen declared in his remarks that the “auditing profession has a long and storied history of excessive secrecy.” To illustrate, he recalled that he spent his first years as an auditor with a Big 8 firm in Los Angeles, in “a large standalone, two-story, red-brick building — without a single window.”

Hansen remembers being told that “the lack of a view emphasized confidentiality — outsiders would never know what was going on within those brick walls.”

At the time, however, he couldn’t see the outside world.

That building bears comparison to today’s reporting model, according to the auditor. “Today’s auditor’s reporting standard is akin to a windowless building lacking visual functionality,” he said. “We can do better, and doing it is long overdue.”

I am a CPA and transparency has been a huge issue for the profession in this big bucks world. Look at the financial crises in the last 30 years. Now name just one that did not involve the profession, or its assertions in some way. What was Sarbanes-Oxley about? Do buyers of stock have a right to know that even a clean opinion is not Lilly-white? How closely tied are auditors of public companies to the companies they audit? What we saw before Sarbanes-Oxley were a lot of rubber-stamp public audits that proved totally unreliable. Millions of stockholders lost their investments to protect an income stream. “The profession” continues this pursuit of indemnification. “The profession” seems to be more interested in escaping litigation than providing a reliable opinion. I certainly oppose protection. In my state, years ago I publicly spoke out against the let’s-quantify-how-much-we-can-do-for-an-audit-client-at-the-highest-possible-level approach. Sarbanes-Oxley put this to bed. What’s wrong with reverting back to the self-regulating idea that gave “the profession” a good reputation? What would be the point of doing an audit without “the profession”accepting the risks it poses while considering the risks the public faces when relying on audit and other professional opinions?

Mr. Dick Kaufman articulated quite well why being a CPA can be embarrassing. Shareholder lawsuits whittled the big eight audit firms down to four. Greed deludes large audit firms to justify selling-out credibility. Continuous tweaking of audit procedures has turned the avoidance of accountability into an art form. The trust an audit was intended to provide has devolved into a lucrative opinion protection racket that co-opted, “the profession”, the same way the mafia co-opted, “the family”. A two front solution might work. The front-end would have an industry funded fund to compensate audit firms 200% of the audit fees if the auditors opt to bow when a client’s greed threatens to contaminate judgement of the auditors, thereby forcing the client to pay extra for a second chance to be audited and raise the status of the firm that bows out. The back-end would be along the lines of the PCOAB’s initiative to make the audit report relevant again.